The present invention relates to a karaoke apparatus responsive to a request command for a karaoke performance and connectable to an external electronic musical apparatus such as a MIDI instrument for merging an additional performance containing percussive tones, effect tones and else.
The karaoke apparatus is constructed such as to produce an instrumental accompaniment part of a requested song, which is concurrently mixed with a live vocal part of the same song picked up by a microphone. The karaoke apparatus is popular, and is installed not only in a bar and a club, but also in a specialized rental room called "karaoke box" and a vehicle such as a tourist bus. The conventional karaoke apparatus is normally a playback type or a musical tone reproduction type composed of a record unit for recording analog or digital audio information and associated video information of karaoke songs, an audio unit for reproducing the karaoke song and mixing a singing voice therewith, a video unit for displaying background pictures and lyric word characters along with the reproduction of the karaoke song, and a control unit for controlling these of the record, audio and video units. Recently, another karaoke apparatus of a synthetic type or a musical tone generating type is developed, which contains a tone generator for synthesizing musical tones according to a song data prescriptive of the karaoke song. Generally, the synthetic karaoke apparatus is connected through a communication network to a host station for retrieving therefrom the song data.
The playback karaoke apparatus has the record unit which is a closed or isolated data source, hence the playback karaoke apparatus cannot respond to a request for a karaoke song which is not stored in the local record unit. On the other hand, the synthetic karaoke apparatus can access a database of the host station to freely retrieve therefrom a desired song data in response to a singer's request. An ultimate type of the synthetic karaoke apparatus is solely dependent on the data telecommunication such that all the requested song data are supplied from the host station without exception. In order to save data communication cost and time required for repeated access to the host station upon every request, a semi-self-support type of the synthetic karaoke apparatus has a storage defining an open data source for stocking the song data supplied from the host station for re-use.
Basically, the karaoke apparatus is constructed to sound a karaoke performance containing an orchestral accompaniment from a loudspeaker while displaying song words concurrently with progression of the karaoke performance. Further, the karaoke apparatus is sophisticated to carry out control of peripheral equipments such as an illumination light and a performance stage in matching with mood of the karaoke performance.
Moreover, a new type of the karaoke apparatus is proposed where the synthetic karaoke apparatus is adopted to connect with an external electronic musical apparatus. This type is not the prior art, but is currently being developed. The karaoke apparatus is constructed to couple with an external electronic musical apparatus through a MIDI interface for a joint live play with the vocal performance of the singer, or a sole live play with the automatic karaoke accompaniment sounded from the karaoke apparatus. In such a case, the karaoke apparatus sounds a mixture of the karaoke performance and the additional performance from a common built-in loudspeaker. For this purpose, the karaoke apparatus of the synthetic type may have a main tone generator for processing the internal song data to synthesize the karaoke performance and a separate tone generator for processing an external MIDI data fed from the coupled external electronic musical apparatus to concurrently synthesize the additional performance. However, addition of the separate tone generator may disadvantageously raise a total production cost of the karaoke apparatus.